Red Thunder

6

DAK’S FATHER OWNS a car repair business a mile down the road from us, four stalls with lifts. The big chains undercut him on lubes and oil changes and tune-ups, but his lot is always full because the people in the neighborhood know he can be persuaded to wait for full payment if you’re in a bind. He sells a lot of recap tires. He is considered to be a magician by the people at Motor Vehicles, who send him the cars nobody believes will ever pass the Florida emissions standards. He usually can patch them up enough to qualify for another year.

Behind the main repair shop there is a two-car garage that used to hold stacks of used tires but now sports a sign: DAKTARI’S CUSTOM SPEED SHOP. This was where Blue Thunder was conceived and born.

Dak turned down the narrow shell alleyway that ran beside the main building and we roared through it and stopped on the cracked concrete next to Blue. We were on a screaming red and yellow Honda trail bike with me perched uneasily behind him. I don’t know how girls can stand riding like that.

“See how you like that one,” Dak said, pointing to a nearly identical bike, but with different colors. It looked okay to me. I got on, started it, revved the engine, grinned at Dak. I had an old Suzuki for a few [46] months the previous summer until I sort of fell off and it wasn’t worth fixing. Okay, I totaled it, and it was a good thing I landed in a ditch or I might have been hurt bad.

“You got a helmet for him?” I turned and saw Mr. Sinclair coming out the back door. He nodded to me, went to put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Dak pretended to fight him off and they played that little game of grab-ass you see some fathers do with their sons. It made me jealous as hell, I’m ashamed to say. I’d never tell Dak.

As usual there were a couple bright but battered race cars parked there in the back. I’m not talking about Grand Prix or Indy cars. These were poor man’s stock cars or sometimes the cheaper formulas. Racing people like to come to Daytona. They like to live here, Daytona is a magic zip code to put on your mail. Nobody who came to Dak’s Custom Speed was going to be out there in the Fabulous 500 without paying a lot of dues first. Unless you’re a third- or fourth-generation Petty or Earnhardt you’re going to be working your way up through the Saturday night dirt track circuit. You’ll be scrabbling to pay for enough good rubber to get through one more race, pounding out the dents with a hammer, and painting it all over with a Wal-Mart spray can. This was the kind of guy who came to see Dak.

Most nights after the garage closed, Mr. Sinclair was back here with him. Keeping beaters on the road was his bread and butter, but working on fast cars with his son was pure enjoyment.

Sometimes I wondered why Dak would bother with trying to get into space. I mean, if I was in his place, would I want to change it? His life seemed the next thing to paradise, to me.

Dak tossed me a helmet and I strapped it on.

“You boys aren’t going too far on those things, are you?” Mr. Sinclair asked.

“We gotta check ’em out, Dad,” Dak told him.

“Just remember they don’t belong to you.”

“We won’t be out all night. So long.” He waved at us as we sprayed some gravel around and zoomed out onto the highway.

I looked over at Dak and he was tapping one side of his helmet with one finger. I didn’t get it. He did it again, and then pointed at my helmet [47] and said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the bike engines. I was about to shout that to him, when I felt the helmet where he was pointing. There was a knob there, which I turned.

“Can you hear me now?”

I turned the knob a little more.

“Cool,” I told him, flipping out the little built-in mike.

“Only the best for the jerk owns these things. I may have fibbed a little when I told him I needed a couple more days to finish up. Can you dig it? Two radical rides like this, one for him and one for his girlfriend. And a radio so he can coo sweet nothings into her ears.”

I glanced down at the tank of my bike, which was an electric pink. I guess that explained the Day-Glo peach color of my helmet. Well, at least it didn’t have any adorable kittens or bluebirds or stuff like that painted on it.

WE GOT OUT of town fast, leaving the carloads of tempting, reddening Yankee-girl flesh and cold Florida beer behind us. We took smaller and smaller roads, pretty soon roaring down dirt trails. We spooked two possums, three deer, and a skunk. We missed the deer and the skunk missed us. It’s getting so you can’t go anywhere without running into deer, sometimes literally. They say there’s about forty million deer in the country now. They’re getting to be a real nuisance, and it seems every year there’s fewer people into hunting them. Me, if I never taste another venison steak it’d be too soon. Mom freezes enough every hunting season to carry us for six months. “Free meat,” she says, and who can argue with her?

It was a grand day to be alive.

I didn’t really tip to where we were going until we went past the backwoods Baptists, or peckerwood Pentecostals, whichever they were, that I remembered from that night when we took the drunk astronaut home. There was a freshly painted sign out among the dozens of others:

THE LORD DON’T BLESS GOVERMENT MEN!

“INFERNAL” REVENOOERS NOT WELCOM!

[48] “I guess spray cans of paint don’t have spellcheckers,” I told Dak. He laughed. “So what are we doing out here? Studying?”

“We could do that, yeah, we could.”

I doubted it. But I followed him off the road and down the long driveway until we could see the house and outlying structures. What you’d call a compound, I guess, except it wasn’t fenced or anything.

It looked a lot different in the daylight. With most of the outdoor pole lights burned out there had been a sinister aspect to it, everything in deep shadows and only a few stars visible overhead through the skinny pine trees. Now it looked unremarkable, much like a thousand other backwoods Florida ranches, maybe a little more prosperous than most.

One thing that hadn’t been there when we arrived that night a week ago was Alicia, sitting in a canvas lounge chair in shorts, halter top, and big sunglasses, grinning at the surprised look on Dak’s face.

“What you doing here, girl?” he wanted to know.

“What are you talking about? I go where I want to go, you know that.”

“Yeah, but-”

“When I found out you were coming out here I figured I’d better see what kind of game you were running on this man, keep your fool ass out of trouble.”

“Game? I ain’t runnin’… how’d you know I was coming out here?”

“What, you were going to ‘surprise’ me?”

Dak looked a little sheepish, glanced at me, and I took the hint. Let them work it out, I didn’t need to listen in on this. I casually strolled over in the direction of the swimming pool, but I couldn’t help glancing back at them, and I couldn’t help smiling. Dak runs to about six and a half feet. Alicia is about five-two, light brown with pale blue eyes, what an old slave owner would have called a mulatto and these days we call mixed-race. So why is it that when they argue, it’s Alicia standing there with her head thrown back and her eyes flashing who is clearly in control and big gawky Dak who is trying to figure out how he lost it again?

[49] HOW DO YOU spell neglect? I’d start with last year’s 350ix Mercedes sports model parked near the back door of the house, looking like there was nothing wrong with it worse than a flat right front tire… but being slowly buried under a layer of pine needles. It would make you cry to see what the pine resin had already done to the paint job.

I don’t know, does having a better grade of car sitting up on blocks and rusting out in your front yard qualify as being more prosperous? Whether it was a fairly new Beemer or a forty-year-old Pinto it still shouted redneck to me.

I wandered slowly around the house and grounds while Dak and Alicia worked it out. The place was both a little better and a little worse than it had looked in the dark.

The house itself was a few years overdue for a coat of paint. Let that go too long and the termites could take it right down to the foundation in a few years.

There was one of those 1980s-type satellite dishes, the ones about the size of a flying saucer that cost ten thousand dollars or more and didn’t do half the job of the hubcap-sized dishes they give away now just to get your business. It was pointed about ten degrees below the horizon, maybe to pick up the ever-popular Earthworm Channel. It must have been impressive and futuristic in its day, but now it was draped with Spanish moss and caked with slimy-looking mildew. Mildew: the Florida state flower.

It was way too late to bring in a high-wheel brushcutter to deal with Colonel Broussard’s lawn. You’d need a fair-sized tractor to cut most of it. Some places would need a bulldozer, just grade it flat and start all over.

A path led from the pool patio through some grapefruit and lemon trees to a lake with a pier jutting out. Tied to a pier was a small wooden rowboat. There was fishing gear in the rowboat.

There was an aluminum boathouse, prefab like the big barn back at the compound. I couldn’t see what was inside it, but judging from the [50] boat trailer sitting on a small concrete boat ramp, it was a fairly substantial craft.

Across the lake, maybe a couple miles away, I saw a few houses and other docks. Probably some good catfish in the lake. Maybe bass. I don’t much see the point of bass when you can catch catfish.

Last year’s crop of lemons were just dried rinds under the trees. It could be a heck of a nice place if somebody cared for it a little, I thought as I made my way back through the grove. But it would be a lot of work.

Off to my left as I went back toward the house was the prefab barn where the little chubby guy had been that night. The building sat on a low hill… well, call it a gentle rise. Florida is a vertically challenged state, and we natives tend to get way too enthusiastic about anything that raises you ten feet off the landscape.

That barn was by far the best-kept thing I could see.

I was about to head back to Dak and Alicia-I could see them sitting on the cushions of the lounge chair nuzzling each other, so I figured they’d managed to work it out-when my eye was caught by a glint of light on the ground in the direction of the barn. I’d probably never have seen it at all if it hadn’t been rolling slowly down the hill.

No, not rolling. It was blowing, like a soap bubble in the air. It was hitting the blades of grass, but not bending them. In fact, for a while I thought it was a soap bubble, and I watched it, waiting for it to pop. It never did, so I leaned over and picked it up.

It was a little bigger than a Ping-Pong ball but it had a silvery, mirror surface like a Christmas tree ornament. It didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. I held it up, between my thumb and two fingers… and almost lost it. It wanted to squirt right out of my grip.

I tried to toss it from one hand to the other, but it wouldn’t do it. It was too light, it kept getting slowed down by the air.

I really liked the thing, right from the first, so I went to my borrowed bike and put the bubble in my helmet… and changed my life and a lot of other lives forever.